Regulatory Resources Dashboard

This page provides relevant research and tools for state public utilities commissions as they pursue an equitable transition to a decarbonized grid. Issues covered here include utility planning, regulatory process and strategy design, utility business models, equity, and procurement.

Regulating for Decarbonization

Purpose: Aligning PUC Mandates with Clean Energy Goals

This brief explores how PUCs can utilize updated legislative mandates, decarbonization-aligned missions and visions, and an updated interpretation of the public interest to make informed decisions.

The People Element: Positioning PUCs for 21st-Century Success

This brief explores how PUCs can respond to changing statutory mandates by positioning staff to effectively collaborate, utilize new and existing resources, and recruit and retain top talent.

Regulatory Process Design for Decarbonization, Equity, and Innovation

This brief explores how regulatory process innovation can help drive equitable decarbonization in the face of increased caseloads, growing stakeholder diversity, ambitious policy timelines, and information asymmetries between regulators and utilities. It includes real-world examples and actionable recommendations for how regulators, lawmakers, and others can support regulatory processes that deliver on state policies.

Utility Business Model Innovation

Making the Clean Energy Transition Affordable

This report explores how totex ratemaking could help keep utility rates affordable through the clean energy transition by putting utility capex and opex projects on a level playing field.

PIMS for Progress

This report reviews a selection of historical PIM examples and provides a simple accounting of the results to identify important lessons for future PIM development. By exploring why some PIM proposals are rejected while others are accepted, as well as what happens to PIMs after acceptance, regulators can learn how these regulatory tools can best be leveraged in a shifting electricity landscape.

Process for Purpose

This paper reviews regulatory reform efforts undertaken by 10 states, describes the processes by which reform can proceed from initiation to delivery on outcomes, and identifies the most significant factors that impact reform efforts’ effectiveness.

Navigating Utility Business Model Reform

This report reviews foundational elements of different reform options, poses key questions to explore their applicability, identifies illustrative experiences for ideas and concepts, and explores policy implementation options to help spur action.

Reimagining the Utility:
Evolving the Functions and Business Model of Utilities to Achieve a Low-Carbon Grid

This paper is focused on changes needed at the grid distribution level to adapt the grid, and on associated options for how to evolve the utility market serving that part of the system.

Bringing Clean Energy Home

This report and associated summary for regulators outlines the fundamental shifts that must take place to reduce residential carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 from 2005 through deployment of carbon-free electricity, demand-side management, building retrofits, and vehicle electrification.

Comments of RMI In the Matter of the Implementation of § 40-3-117,
C.R.S Regarding an Investigation into Performance-Based Ratemaking

These comments offer an analytic approach to support the Colorado PUC’s review of performance-based regulation (PBR), evaluating whether adopting PBR would be net beneficial to the state, and illustrating how a well-constructed PBR framework can reduce customer costs while supporting state policy goals. While it focused on the Colorado context, it can be applied to other commissions considering PBR.

Five Lessons from Hawaii’s Groundbreaking PBR Framework

This article offers five important takeaways that can improve other states’ efforts navigating new utility business models. It is based on Hawaii’s experience navigating how PBR can support climate and clean energy policy goals while still keeping rates manageable for families and businesses.

Aligning Utility Performance with the Public Interest

This article offers eight recommendations to regulators, utilities, and other stakeholders looking to integrate PIMs into their regulatory frameworks.

States Move Swiftly on Performance-Based Regulation to Achieve Policy Priorities

This article examines some of the emerging trends in performance-based regulation — and ways that states now implementing or considering PBR can learn from the early adopters.

Building Electrification

Regulatory Solutions for Building Decarbonization

This report outlines 10 key strategies to support building decarbonization. It is accompanied by a resource library that shares resources for regulators from commissions across the U.S., nonprofits, and media that expand on the themes and strategies introduced in our report.

Building Electrification: A Key to a Safe Climate Future

This post explores why building electrification—as opposed to renewable natural gas—is the least-cost and most flexible path to decarbonization.

Eight Benefits of Building Electrification for Households, Communities, and Climate

This post provides regulators with a deeper understanding about why building electrification can help move cities, states, and the country away from burning fossil fuels.

Community Engagement and Just Transition

Five Steps for Utilities to Foster Authentic Community Engagement

This article offers five steps regulators can direct utilities to take to build beneficial relationships with their communities.

Ensuring an Inclusive Clean Energy Transition
A Recovery and Revitalization Framework for Coal Workers and Communities

In this actionable framework for state and federal policymakers, RMI explores how to design and implement comprehensive climate policy that ensures that the energy transition uplifts — rather than abandons — coal workers and communities and those disproportionately bearing the brunt of health impacts from coal.

Comments of RMI and WRA in CO PUC Equity Pre-Rulemaking

These comments, filed in the Colorado PUC’s proceeding implementing SB 21-272, provide resources and insights informed by RMI’s national level experience working in energy equity and community stakeholder facilitation that can be broadly used by regulators seeking to enhance equity in their work.

Resource Planning and Procurement

How to Build Clean Energy Portfolios

This study presents recommendations for updated electricity resource procurement processes that meet the challenge of the coming decade. It lays out three principles for regulators that define the leading edge of resource procurement.

The Non-Wires Solutions Implementation Playbook

This playbook enables grid planners to more systematically evaluate opportunities to deploy modular—and often lower-cost and lower risk—non-wires solutions portfolios.

How to Retire Early: Making Accelerated Coal Phaseout Feasible and Just

This report estimates that replacing the entire fleet of global coal plants with clean energy plus battery storage could be done at a net annual savings as early as 2022. The rapidly declining costs of renewables push net annual savings to $105 billion in 2025—before considering coal’s dire health, climate, and environmental impacts, or accounting for the social and environmental benefits of reducing pollutants.

The Best Time to Plan Transmission Was 15 Years Ago. The Second-Best Time Is Now

In this post, RMI demonstrates why cost-effective decarbonization requires the rapid build out the long-range transmission lines that can carry wind and solar power from where it is produced to where it is consumed.

Planning to Harness the Inflation Reduction Act

This toolkit, informed by and designed for regulators, offers examples and tools that commissions can use to ensure resource plans consider the IRA and account for potential customer savings.

Reimagining Resource Planning

This resource provides specific examples of regulation that enables trusted, comprehensive, and aligned resource planning in the face of significant grid changes. It also offers a framework for revisiting the fundamentals of planning.

Data Transparency and Analytics Tools

Utility Transition Hub

RMI maintains a comprehensive, open-access database of utility financial, operational, emissions, customer, equity, and regulatory data. These data collectively shed light on the capital investment remaining in fossil plants, how those plants are dispatched, how they impact customer rates, and the degree to which they prevent utilities from being climate-aligned. These data also tell the story of how renewable energy investment is shaping the electricity generation landscape, rates, and decarbonization, among many other potential analytical insights.